


Ships in the Night

by fabrega



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blackwatch Era, Established Relationship, In-Universe RPF, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-18 22:34:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9405827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabrega/pseuds/fabrega
Summary: The photo is of Gabe and Morrison, taken through the open door of one of the transports. They're seated side by side, their foreheads tilted together. They're angled away from the camera and at enough of a distance that it's impossible to tell anything else, but that doesn't stop Jesse from squinting at the photo for several long moments.The caption underneath readsMoreyes? More like MoreYes!!!!!Jesse frowns at his tablet and says to himself, "What the fuck?"





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smarshtastic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smarshtastic/gifts).



> Yes, this is ridiculous, and no, I really have no excuse. For [smarshtastic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smarshtastic/), who didn't stop me.

It's not like Jesse's looking for it, when he finds it. 

Gabe had mentioned some old photo from the first incarnation of Overwatch, something about a photographer who'd been embedded with the group to help the war effort, and Jesse had wanted to see it. Gabe doesn't have a copy of the photo, because of course he doesn't--Gabe hasn't ever said and Jesse hasn't ever asked, but he gets the feeling that the days when Gabe led Overwatch are kind of a sore subject--and they weren't on the netsite of the new kinder, gentler, peacekeeping Overwatch for obvious reasons, so he'd had to resort to search engines.

Gabe had remembered the photographer's name, Yenson, so Jesse looks up _Overwatch photos Yenson_ and pokes around through the results. No site seems to have the full set of photos; one has a bunch of shots of the Overwatch members in action in battle, another has a collection of friendly candids, a third has the kind of not-quite-candid shots that ought to be used in recruitment ads. Jesse finds himself liking the candids the most: Ana with Fareeha on her knee at a briefing; Reinhardt grinning, one hand wrapped around the hammer and the other gesticulating wildly, then another of him in exactly the same spot, leaned up against the hammer, fast asleep; Liao standing on a table with a cup in her hand; Torbjörn with one of Gabe's shotguns in his lap; Gabe in front of the group for a briefing, watching intently as Morrison explains something; Gabe and Ana and Liao standing in front of a map, their backs to the camera; Morrison in profile, looking at a sunset; Gabe smiling into a cup of what Jesse's going to guess is coffee. 

They all look so _young_.

He finds the photo Gabe had told him about (Ana stretched out asleep across the bench seat of a transport, her head leaned on Reinhardt, who's sitting on the floor below her) on a site that seems to have aggregated the most intimate of these candids. Jesse scrolls through them, not quite understanding the captions, until he hits one that stops him in his tracks: it's Gabe and Morrison, taken through the open door of one of the transports. They're seated side by side, their foreheads tilted together. They're angled away from the camera and at enough of a distance that it's impossible to tell anything else, but that doesn't stop Jesse from squinting at the photo for several long moments.

The caption underneath reads _Moreyes? More like MoreYes!!!!!_

Jesse frowns at his tablet and says to himself, "What the fuck?" The site he's looking at has an elaborate tagging system and _moreyes_ is one of these tags, so he clicks on it.

What comes up is a series of posts, all of Gabe and Morrison, all with varying amounts of commentary about whether or not the two of them are sleeping together.

The first post is a vid, Gabe and Morrison on a late-night show, talking about Overwatch to the show's handsome host. Morrison's a natural on camera--Jesse already knew that--and Gabe leans on him a little, both metaphorically and literally. Jesse watches the video, scrubs through it twice, and doesn't see anything out of the ordinary, just Gabe being nervous, wanting to be back with his team, helping to win this damn war instead of being paraded around like some kind of performing monkey. The post, though, has about five paragraphs under the vid, pointing out how Gabe keeps looking at Morrison, the casual way Morrison keeps touching Gabe. It references some other appearance they'd made together, and specific frames of the vid are pulled out and have sparkly hearts drawn on them.

Jesse scrolls through more posts, unable to help himself: a series of photos marked up with arrows and circles, each detailing some imagined offense against what the post is calling Man Rules; Gabe and Morrison in their uniforms at some UN function, Secretary-General Adawe between them; an interview Gabe had given where he talks about how he and Morrison go way back and how he couldn't do this without him. 

He stops scrolling on a post of blurry pictures some civilian had taken after a battle, Gabe clutching at his bleeding side and leaning heavily against Morrison as Morrison shouts at somebody out of frame. Jesse knows that scar, a puckered patchwork on Gabe's side that Jesse runs his hands over often, kisses whenever he can. Even though Jesse knows, intellectually, that a scar results from an injury, it's strange to see the moment itself, and even stranger to see it celebrated.

The most recent posts lament that the two of them haven't been seen together much since the end of the Omnic Crisis, wondering if they'd had a falling out since Morrison is in charge of Overwatch now. There's even a photo in one of the posts that Jesse is in, the two of them and Morrison and a bunch of the other Overwatch folks getting medals at the UN. (One of the commenters has helpfully pointed out Jesse's "ridiculous hat", and he gets indignant despite himself.) Consensus seems to be that if they _are_ still together, it's mostly hate-fucking now. _That_ , at least, Jesse feels pretty confident that he can debunk.

Jesse's comm pings. He'd told Gabe he'd come help out with a training session for the new recruits, and he's due there in fifteen. Ostensibly they're being trained and tested on their hand-to-hand skills, but the real lesson is part fear of god, part how to lose gracefully. Gabe couldn't do it without him, and so Jesse puts his tablet down and heads to the gym. (He doesn't close any of the tabs he has open, though, and he doesn't feel good about it.)

One of Jesse's myriad, impossible-to-quantify skills is the ability to get his ass kicked. It doesn't _sound_ like a good thing, but you're going to lose sometime, and it's best when you do that you take minimal damage to your person and your ego and that you're able to walk away. It's a skill Jesse learned early and thoroughly in Deadlock, and one he's been commended for during his time with Blackwatch, as he spends far less time laid up in the infirmary than most of his colleagues.

What this means in practice for the training session is that Gabe tosses Jesse around for a good fifteen to twenty minutes in front of a class of rapt recruits and then at the end of it, they're quizzed not on what Gabe had done to Jesse, but what Jesse had done in response. 

Most of the class usually fails.

It's not the first time they've done this, and it's always been...nice, for Jesse. There's a complicated swirl of feelings around it, happiness and pain and the absolute trust he has in Gabe Reyes, but it's nice. The last few times, the ones they've done since he and Gabe had started--dating? seeing each other? sleeping together?--they've ended up back in Gabe's quarters after, unable to keep their hands off each other. Today, though, Jesse looks at him and sees the photo of him leaning on Morrison, and he makes a tactical retreat.

.

The second time, Jesse is kind of looking for it.

The net is a weird place, and while he's hoping that the people he'd discovered yesterday who liked _moreyes_ (Jesse sits straight up in bed in the middle of the night when he realizes that it's a portmanteau of their names, _Mor_ rison and R _eyes_ ) are an anomaly, he can't help but check to make sure.

What he finds is that they are just the tip of the iceberg. A search for _moreyes overwatch_ turns up an almost shocking amount of content, and the majority of it looks to be of the fictional variety, art and stories and the occasional terrible vid. 

The image search alone is mind-boggling. If the photos of Gabe and Morrison together had been unsettling, the artwork of them--holding hands, kissing, in all kinds of more compromising positions--is downright weird. A lot of the art has them in their uniforms, in varying states of undress, but occasionally they're in civilian clothes or medieval armor or, in one very memorable instance, Morrison is drawn as an actual tiger and Gabe is shirtless and mounted on his back.

The fiction is a different kind of weird. Some of it's dirty, and some of it's sweet, and while Jesse considers himself fairly worldly, he's learning so much about the different ways that two people can fuck each other. A lot of it sounds unrealistic and a little bit unsafe, and some of it is stuff that he honestly knows Gabe explicitly has no interest in, but some of it is...surprisingly hot, if he imagines that it's about two fictional strangers named Jack and Gabriel, not anybody he knows.

It's like a train wreck, and Jesse can't manage to look away. He even creates an account on one of the fiction websites (after routing his net traffic through the proxies like Agent Edwards had showed him and creating a useless email account to sign up with, he's not an idiot) so he can read more of it. Pretty much every minute he isn't training or sleeping is spent reading about his boyfriend fucking their CO. 

He knows it's not healthy, and after the first day he spends reading in his quarters, one eye on the door in case anyone comes looking for him, he retreats to his favorite hideout on-base. It's essentially part of the ceiling vents, barely-exposed in a mostly-unused corner of the base, accessible from the floor below if you try hard enough or from a specific loose tile in the floor above, big enough for him to stretch out in but a close fit for more than one person. It's been Jesse's go-to hiding place since he'd joined Blackwatch; sometimes things are overwhelming and he needs a place to go where he knows he won't be disturbed. He'll curl up there with a blanket and take a nap or read a book, recharge away from people, come out when he's needed or when he's ready. It's the perfect place to read about Jack Morrison on his knees, taking Strike Commander Reyes' meaty cock all the way down his throat. 

If he idly palms his own dick while reading, well, that would be really fucked up, and certainly nobody's business but his own.

(He comes down from his hideout to eat, and once or twice he accidentally makes eye contact with Gabe in the canteen. Each time, Gabe looks a little concerned, and Jesse immediately slinks away.)

.

Jesse's not sure how many days he's been sneaking away when Gabe finally pokes his head into Jesse's hiding spot, pulling himself up from the floor below, resting on his elbows for a moment and fixing Jesse with a soft smile before coming the rest of the way in. It's a cramped fit for the two of them, and Jesse leans into Gabe for a moment, touch-starved, before he remembers what he'd been doing up here. He squawks, mortified, and shoves his tablet down between his hip and the wall.

Gabe gives him a look but doesn't ask. "Thought I might find you up here," he says instead.

Jesse shrugs, more than a little embarrassed.

After another moment, Gabe asks, "Is everything okay?"

"Sure. Yeah, sure." He's aware even as he says it that it doesn't sound at all convincing.

"I haven't seen much of you this week." Gabe's voice is even, but he leans into Jesse's side, maybe a little touch-starved himself. "I wanted to make sure--"

"Did you know that people on the net think that you and Morrison were fucking? _Are_ fucking?" Jesse blurts out.

Gabe lets out of a kind of strangled noise. He presses a hand to his face, then lowers it and takes several deep breaths. "Yeah, I did know that. Some reporter back during the Crisis brought it up to us, thinking we'd find it funny, or maybe confirm it, I don't know. How did you--is that why you've been avoiding me? Because of some garbage you found on the net?"

Jesse feels his cheeks start to burn. When he puts it like that, it sounds ridiculous. But when he'd been--reading, looking at, _consuming_ it, it had felt real, like what _ought_ to be happening, like his and Gabe's actual real relationship was somehow intruding on this alternate, maybe sexier version of reality. He stares down at where he's wedged his tablet, unable to meet Gabe's eyes.

"You know that we didn't, right? Jack and I?"

Jesse looks back up, and Gabe is studying his face. "Really?"

"Really." Gabe smiles wryly. "We tried, once? We'd been fighting a lot, and Ana locked us in a supply closet and told us to 'sort it out'. He kissed me--turns out, the tension between us wasn't _that_ kind of tension. I think it _still_ may be the weirdest fucking thing that's ever happened to me."

"You _kissed_ Strike Commander Morrison?"

"It wasn't great. They don't call us _brothers_ -in-arms for nothing," Gabe says, with an exaggerated shudder. "We were only ever good friends, and now we're not even that. Meanwhile, _you're_ the one I wake up with. Ignore those people on the net; you're now one of three people on the planet who knows for sure that I've kissed Jack Morrison."

"Well, ain't I just special," Jesse says, finally smiling a little.

"You are." Gabe leans in and kisses him. "I hope you know that by now."

Jesse nods, smiling more broadly, something warm and bright flaring in his chest. "I'm sorry I got all caught up in this stuff. I should've just asked you about it to start."

Gabe laughs. "I can see why you might not have. I'm glad I could set the record straight for you." He kisses Jesse again. "Now, unfortunately, we both have to be at this briefing in ten, but maybe after that we can head back to my quarters and you can show me anything new and exciting you've learned from all that porn you've been reading."

Jesse stammers for a moment, wanting to make some excuse, then just gives up and grins.

.

(The briefing is with Morrison, and when Jesse makes eye contact with him and then bursts out laughing halfway through, he absolutely cannot tell anyone why.)


End file.
